Reading Harry Potter as a School Story: Disciplines and Tactics in Hogwarts

• Main Authors: Huei-Fang Lee, 李蕙芳
• Other Authors: Feng-Hsin Liu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/06009435991671566061

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 外國語文學系所 === 100 === This thesis reads J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series as a school story. Following the tradition of the school story genre, Rowling on the one hand remains the typical elements of the genre in her books, including Hogwarts’ disciplines and the students’ rule breakings; on the other hand, she renews the rigid frame of school story with the element of Fantasy—magic—and with the features of postmodernity. While Hogwarts regulates students’ everyday life with disciplines, some teachers also subtly promote students’ antidisciplinary actions against the rules, which makes the ostensibly ordinary rule breakings imply more than transgression. Thus, this thesis argues that from the postmodern perspective, some of the students’ rule breakings and the teachers’ promotion of rule breakings stand for the postmodern features. Assuming that the educational purpose of Hogwarts is to shape disciplined wizards who will make positive contribution to the wizarding society in the future, the thesis first adopts Foucault’s concepts of discipline-blockade and panopticism, and then complements Foucault’s deficiency with Mathiesen’s notion of synopticism to investigate the exercise of power and the top-down control in Hogwarts. However, in Hogwarts, there is subversive power held by the students who try to elude the disciplinary control. Michel de Certeau’s analysis of “tactics” probing into the practices carried out by the weak is then drawn on to examine students’ ways of using tactics to survive disciplines. The thesis’s conclusion suggests that both Hogwarts students and the teachers who promote rule breaking are postmodern representatives: they question the rules and find ways to decrease the limitation brought by the rules without having a direct clash with the authorities.